Looks like a Quake 3 match isn’t going to cut it for Bethesda Softworks. The Elder Scrolls developer’s lawsuit against the Minecraft makers at Mojang is heading to the court system. Bethesda issued the suit waiting to change the name of Mojang’s upcoming collectible card game, simply known as Scrolls, which the company believes infringes on its trademark of the phrase “The Elder Scrolls”.
“I agree that the word ‘Scrolls’ is part of that trademark, but as a gamer, I have never ever considered that series of (very good) role playing games to be about scrolls in any way, nor was that ever the focal point of neither their marketing nor the public image,” Mojang’s Markus Persson stated last month. “The implication that you could own the right to all individual words within a trademark is also a bit scary. We looked things up and realized they didn’t have much of a case, but we still took it seriously. Nothing about Scrolls is meant to in any way derive from or allude to their games.” Persson later added, via Twitter, “The Scrolls case is going to court! Weee!”
“Yeah, we got a notice from the Swedish court…We are going to do as much as we can,” Mojang business developer Daniel Kaplan confirmed to Gamasutra, “since I really hate it how the big boys always get their own way.
“They even took screenshots from our trailer and said we copied them… we have mountains in the Scrolls trailer, and they have that too in Skyrim,” Kaplan added, laughed, “It is really silly believing our game will be confused with their FPS-RPG with realistic graphics…They have dumped everything they could find about Scrolls.”
(via 1UP)
What’s your stance on Bethesda v. Mojang, EGs? Should it have been settled with a Quake match? Comment below!